A sales funnel illustrates your customer’s journey and works by increasing the level of engagement and trust in each interaction with your prospect. It typically contains six stages, starting with awareness and ending with loyal customers. Each stage has more meaningful activities than the last. While not all prospects will reach the end of the funnel, those who do are actively engaged and therefore more serious about buying your product or service.
In the previous section, I listed the 5 steps of nurturing your prospects. The ultimate goal of that process is to create Lifetime Customers. As you can imagine, those lifetime customers will be major contributors to the long-term growth of your business. This is where a lot of businesses fail. It’s a lot easier to sell lots of your best products and/or services to a small group of raving fans than it is to sell just one item to masses of new customers.
Cons: I'm on the Etison Suite because I like the simplicity of using Actionetics as my email client. Yes, it is an expensive cost each month but the platform and process was created by one of the best marketers and online salespersons out there. It's ably supported by a great community of entrepreneurs all using (or trying to use) the software to get their business to the next level.
Cons: It is soooo expensive. There is no option to have a true website, you basically have to create each page separately and connect them which, there is no easy way to do. Also, I found that the cloud platform they host on would often crash and send my users and error message. Builderall has all the same stuff for way cheaper http://bit.ly/CheapCF

Sometimes, when you’re stumped about why your sales funnel isn’t converting the optimal amount of customers, it helps to look at examples. We’ve revisited more than 10 companies that have strong sales funnels to see what changes they’ve made over the years. We’ve also added several brand new sales funnel examples and we plan to add more in the future.

The Discovery stage is where your prospect’s interest is piqued. They are curious about your company and products and want to learn more. In this stage, you are sharing valuable educational content related to your prospect’s problem or need. This stage occurs while you are qualifying your prospect, conducting initial meetings, and defining their needs.
There’s a better solution: It's not impossible with sales funnel management automation. Set up your system with the response you want, and it will be ready to send it immediately to any interested prospect—even the one who contacts you on Saturday at 3 am. As captured leads pass down the funnel, your sales automation platform can send added personalized emails that are just right for each moment.